Each are community leaders. Robert Prcic and Dr. Donna Wilson both hail from their local university, with Prcic coaching youth in basketball and Wilson in her tenacity fighting for education and funding for post-secondary. Both David Khan and Susan Wright are respected lawyers in downtown Calgary, each with a community of support behind them as large as their shared decades of experience in law.

Susan Wright, with her decades of experience in oil and gas, truly brings the knowledge to the table to advocate for Albertans for royalties, effective ownership, and energy stewardship. Dr. Donna Wilson is one of the pre-eminent scholars on healthcare that combines both real world management of health care and the scholastic knowledge to get to the bottom of Alberta's healthcare woes.

All four combine the energy, youth, and experience needed to advocate for Albertans on the ongoing crisis in healthcare, the debilitating defunding of education, and to truly champion accountability in Edmonton.

These candidates are excellent candidates to be representatives in the legislature. We are proud as a party to put them forward to represent the citizens of each of their respective constituencies.

This weekend marked the annual Pride Parade, a time when Calgary's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer (LGBTQ) population invites the city to join in a celebration of diversity and inclusion. And, I think it is great that so many politicians of all stripes are taking part in this parade where, just a short time ago, many were absent.

In fact, one of the many reasons that I am a Liberal is because of people like Laurie Blakeman, MLA Edmonton-Centre, who has been marching in pride parades for 20 plus years, long before it was fashionable to do so.

I am truly thankful that some of the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose MLAs joined to celebrate diversity and pay tribute to the values enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and human rights codes across this great nation. Even if it is sort like seeing Oilers fans on the Red Mile following a Flames playoff victory -- they are at the party, but I am not sure they were hoping for the same result.

Alberta deserves both a strong economy AND a strong society. This is the central message of the Alberta Liberal Party, and it was the central theme of our 109th Annual General Meeting, which was held in Calgary on Saturday.

And what an AGM! A big thanks goes out to Pete Helfrich and his team of volunteers who did an outstanding job of organizing what everybody I talked to said was the best AGM in years.

The room was packed with people energized by our vision for Alberta and who believe the time has come for a government that takes a holistic and integrated view of the kind of society we want to live in and how to make it a reality.